Attention people on the east coast! Make sure to stop by and see our booth at South East Linux Fest (SELF) June 10th – the 12th if you’re going to be near the Charlotte area. We’ll be handing out some awesome schwag and filling you in on all the awesome new features coming up in PC-BSD and FreeBSD. Ken Moore and Joshua Smith will be giving BSD focused talks this year . Josh’s talk will be “The PC-BSD Advantage” which will offer a bird’s eye view of PC-BSD for new users and Linux users (as well as some really cool new features for long term users!), and Ken Moore’s talk “Lumina: Lighting the Way to the Future” will be detailing the excellent Lumina desktop environment. Ken will touch on the new sysadm utility and how we plan on integrating it within Lumina and PC-BSD. We hope to see you there!

We’d like to take a moment to officially welcome Joe Maloney to the PC-BSD project as our Lead System Architect. Joe has been working as a volunteer developer with the PC-BSD project for several years and began committing to the project in 2013. Joe’s duties will include working on our command line utilities, bug fixing, managing the ports tree, and general creative control over old utilities that need to be revamped. Joe has 12+ years experience working with FreeBSD and works day to day as a Quality Assurance Engineer for iXsystems and has been doing excellent work writing new tests to make FreeNAS more resilient going forward. Take a moment and help us welcome Joe to the team!

If you missed the inaugural meeting of the Knoxville BSD User Group, you definitely don’t want to miss this one. Lead Documentation Expert and author for the PC-BSD and FreeNAS projects Dru Lavigne will be giving a talk: “You Too Can Doc Like an Egyptian”. For more information on meeting times and venue, please visit the Knoxville Tennessee BSD User Group’s web page. We hope to see you there!

Since the founding of the Lumina desktop project, one of the most common questions I get asked is: “I am not a programmer, but how can I help out?” Well today I would like to open up a new method of contributing for those of you that are graphically-inclined: the creation of a brand new icon theme for the Lumina desktop!

This new icon theme will adhere to the FreeDesktop specifications[1] for registering an icon theme, and the good news is that I have already handled all the administrative setup/framework for you so that all you need to do to contribute is basically just send in icon files!

This will be a high-contrast, high-resolution, fully-scalable (SVG) theme.

The general concept is a white foreground, with a black outline/shadow around the icon, and colorized emblems/overlays for distinguishing between similar icons (“folder” vs “folder-network” for instance). We are going for a more professional/simple look to the icons since tiny image details generally do not scale as well across the range we are looking at.

The details on how to contribute an icon to the theme are listed on the repository page as well, but here is the summary:

Icons which are still needed are listed in the TODO.txt files within each directory.

Submit the icon file via git pull request

Add an entry for your icon/submission to the AUTHORS file (to ensure each contributor gets proper credit for their work)

Remove the icon from the appropriate TODO.txt file/list

If you are not familiar with git or how to send git pull requests, feel free to email me the icon file(s) you want to contribute and I can add them to the source tree for you (and update the AUTHORS/TODO files as necessary). Just be sure to include your full name/email so we can give you the proper credit for your work (if you care about that).

As an added bonus since we don’t have any actual icons yet (just the general guidelines), the first contributor to send in some icons will get to help decide the overall look-n-feel of the icon theme!